Re: about GNU Hurd

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 09:11:56PM +0200, Anders Breindahl wrote:

> After all, there isn't so much work that needs to be done, in order
> for the Hurd to be a satisfactory standin for Linux.

Well, depends on what you mean by "satisfactory standing". There are
thousands of man-years of work in Linux. Even leaving aside drivers, as
we don't need to rewrite them; and considering that some things should
be easier to implement due to the better architecture: It's still
totally impossible to bring the Hurd anywhere near the level of
optimization, the amount of functionality, and general polish offered by
Linux, any time soon. No fund will help that; you simply need hunderts
of active developers and millions of users to achieve this...

However, if you settle for a system that works on a majority of
hardware, covers the most important needs, and comes with rather poor
performance and various other minor shortcomings, but is really usable
on a day by day basis: I believe the Hurd is indeed not too far from
that.

> This amount of work could well do some significant change, in this
> respect.

I agree -- I think there are some areas in the Hurd where an experienced
full-time developer should be able to make a considerable difference in
a relatively short time.

-antrik-